Follow The Money - Some Scaife Updates

From Rich Lord at the P-G:

Three foundations that Richard Mellon Scaife long guided are heading into a season of leadership changes, reorganizations and dramatic expansions three months after the filing of the late billionaire’s will.

Nearly doubling in size is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which Mr. Scaife, son of the philanthropy’s namesake, turned into a national force in funding the development of conservative thought. That foundation is expected to absorb the smaller, similarly focused Carthage Foundation.

Then there's this:

The Sarah Scaife Foundation has “been responsible for a lot of national public policy for the conservative movement, in particular the work done by the Heritage Foundation, and in Pennsylvania the work done by the Commonwealth Foundation and the Allegheny Institute [for Public Policy],” said Allegheny County Republican Committee chairman Jim Roddey.

The merger of the Carthage Foundation and the terms of Mr. Scaife’s will portend “more grants and … a bigger scope,” said Mr. Roddey, who is on the Sarah Scaife Foundation’s board.

Did you know that Jim Roddey was also once on the board of the Allegheny Institute?

Yes, he was.  Small world.  Lotsa Scaife money supporting lotsa conservative causes.

But while the Sarah Scaife Foundation's getting bigger - meaning there's be more money for the Heritage Foundation, AEI and so on - this is also occurring:

The two children of Richard Mellon Scaife have demanded, in court filings last week, an accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars that they said was drained from a trust to cover the losses of the Tribune-Review newspapers, despite the trustees’ duty to preserve funds for them.

Jennie Scaife, of Palm Beach, Fla., and David N. Scaife, of Shadyside, filed similar petitions in Orphans Court of Allegheny County. They claimed that three trustees who controlled $210 million in 2005 let that dwindle to nothing by the time of their father’s death, four months ago.

And:

The petitions suggest deep divisions between, on one hand, Richard Mellon Scaife’s children, and, on the other, the handful of close associates managing his estate, estimated to be in the billion-dollar range. Richard Mellon Scaife did not mention the children in his will, which split most of his wealth between two foundations.

Now obviously, I have no info other than these two articles in the P-G, and it'll probably be years before this is resolved, but it looks as though Scaife drained one trust (one that he shouldn't have) to fund his Tribune-Review, reserving the rest of his vast wealth to be passed on to the three (or two, now that Carthage has been folded into Sarah Scaife) Foundations that support Scaife's political causes.

Why couldn't he use his own money to prop up the obvious financial failure that is his Tribune-Review?

There's something vastly distasteful about all that.